Snow White and Rose Red ~ 4 stars

I’ve been a Patricia C. Wrede reader for several years now. She wrote a few Star Wars novels and I've also enjoyed her Enchanted Forest Chronicles. I’ve always liked the spicy, distinct characters in her books, so when I saw she had also written a retelling of the old fairy tale about Snow White and Rose Red, I thought I’d give it a go.

It wasn't quite what I expected from Patricia C. Wrede. I was used to reading her more recent publications, but Snow White and Rose Red was one of the first stories she had published, and her writing has changed a lot since then. Snow White and Rose Red follows the original fairy tale closely enough that I could see where the parallels were, but the characters had changed enough that the story was obviously "wearing new clothes" as I like to put it. It had been fleshed out and made more intricate. All the leaps of logic, typical of old fairy tales, had been ironed out and explained.

Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red is the story of two beautiful sisters, Blanche and Rosamund, who live with their widowed mother near the border of the world of the fay. When a half-fay, half-mortal man called Hugh is subjected to human magic and forced to take the shape of a bear, kind Blanche and Rosamund try to do everything they can to return him to his original shape. This means taking the considerable risk of being discovered and tried as witches by suspicious neighbors. In the end, they need the help of Hugh's brother John, another half-fay, to break the spell. In so doing, they discover that Hugh's transformation was the result of a plot to tear the human world and the world of the fay apart. 

The story concludes with the classic fairy tale ending: the fair maidens wed their new sweethearts, the half-fay Hugh and John. Usually I don't like these kinds of endings, because it makes the romances very unrealistic, but Patricia C. Wrede did an admirable job of making the relationships between the characters real enough that I could see them getting married.

I found Snow White and Rose Red to be a fairly entertaining story. It was written with a more reserved, strict style than other fairy tale retellings that I’ve read. It doesn't have the very personal style that most novels published in the past 5 or 6 years have, but this is mainly because Snow White and Rose Red was published in 1989, before that style of writing became popular. In fact, the style of Snow White and Rose Red is great for that story, because it makes it read more like a fairy tale and adds grace and elegance to it. I also enjoyed the way the original fairy tale was restructured for Wrede’s retelling, and I think that her revision of it added a lot of appeal to the story.

The biggest thing that I noticed about Snow White and Rose Red was the language. Wrede uses ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, in addition to the usual ‘you.’ Other changes to the language, such as some of the more archaic forms of words (forsooth, seemth), and even the use of ‘an’ in the place of 'if' in some cases, all make the language a little more challenging to less experienced readers. To me, these things just added to the unique style of the book, since it hearkens back to an older way of speaking. But for other, less patient readers, this might make it too difficult to be interesting. My twelve-year-old sister Jo also read Snow White and Rose Red, and although she enjoyed it, she did say that the language was sometimes an impediment.

So, in the end, I would just say this.

"An thou can read and understand it, thou’lt know why I sayeth that it seems a goodly book."

Link to author website: http://pcwrede.com/